@BB:

Thanks for the tutorial...

Here's a crop from from what I came up with following your guidance...

In some ways the ray trace bounce of the characters seems "real-er" than the straight on view... It appears that the "bounce" blurs the skin surface and makes it seem like you are seeing someone out side in bright sunlight.

There is a single INF set at 70 and the IBL AO is set about 20.

One other thing I noticed is the change in lighting shows the flaws in the tree's and the darker skinned character's Material

Again thanks for the help... I've got another scene that I had tride to use VSS with and ran into the IBL black spots... now maybe I can fix it....